The Naked City Blog

Exploring life in the city – Charlotte – and the greater metro region. Looking at urban design, transportation, growth, the built environment and more.

Mary Newsom is a lifelong journalist and observer of city life in the Charlotte region and beyond, with a focus on urban design, sustainable development, growth and city planning. She is associate director of urban and regional affairs at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. Her blog reflects her views only, not necessarily those of the institute or of UNC Charlotte.
Contact: mnewsom@uncc.edu.

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Thursday, October 20, 2011

A planning and 'public input' dilemma

Is it just me, or have others also been spotting an increasing trickle of articles that might be viewed as anti-planning. Consider this one: "The false hope of comprehensive planning," from Michael Lewyn, an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Fla., on the Planetizen.com website.
Lewyn uses the Jacksonville comprehensive plan to point out that a city plan can be a sprawl-promoter or a sprawl-fighter. The devil is in the details. Just having a comprehensive plan for your city doesn't mean your city will necessarily grow in a prudent way. This has been one of my concerns about Charlotte and much of this metro region. The city's plans say all kinds of wonderful things, but the underlying zoning ordinances allow much that the plans don't call for – examples being the very suburban-style, highway-oriented retail development along North Tryon Street, which has been a designated light rail corridor since 1998.

But how can planners even hope to do a good job of listening to their communities AND promoting sensible provisions for growth, when apparently the overwhelming majority of Americans don't want to see ANY development?

Andres Duany, the visionary architect and planner who was instrumental in founding New Urbanism and in changing the way many professionals write zoning codes and transportation plans, has been pooh-poohing the idea of too much public involvement, especially when the NIMBYs carry too much weight (not traditionally a problem in development-happy Charlotte, let me add). In this piece in January's Architect magazine he discusses the relative merits of top-down planning (more efficient) and bottom-up planning (involves people but takes a lot longer and is more expensive. Here is a counterpoint from Della Rucker, in NewGeography, who still trusts the public to know what's best in the end.
But what if the public really doesn't want any development at all? A survey from The Saint Index found that 79 percent of Americans said their hometown is fine the way it is or already over-developed. Some 86 percent of suburban Americans don't want new development in their community. The anti-development sentiment is the highest in six years of Saint Index surveys.

So if you try to involve the community and listen to what they want, do you end up with a plan that forbids growth? How smart is that? Should planners heed community wishes, even if they know what the community wants is impossible or imprudent? If the community wants cul-de-sacs and single-family subdivisions and no retail near where they live and also hates traffic congestion (the inevitable result of spread-out development that requires you to drive everywhere, and of cul-de-sac street patterns that funnel everyone onto a few arterials), what's a planner to do?

Duany used to say that people hate growth because for the past 50 years it's mostly been soul-searingly ugly and has, indeed, made life more unpleasant for the neighbors. I think he's onto something. When people today imagine "development" the image they have is big-box strip centers, single-family subdivisions, grassy and boring office parks or apartment complexes scattered around a site like dead earthworms. No wonder they're NIMBYs.

The challenge for planners, it seems, is first to educate people on the repercussions of their choices and then, to show them choices for other ways to develop: tree-lined urban streets, with shops and shop windows on the sidewalks, to choose one example. But the planners can't stop there. Step Three has to be to make sure the supporting ordinances and standards require the good and disallow the bad. Without Step Three, too many plans will, as Lewyn points out, produce development that pleases neither the planners nor the NIMBYs.

6
comments:

'But what if the public really doesn't want any development at all? A survey from The Saint Index found that 79 percent of Americans said their hometown is fine the way it is or already over-developed. Some 86 percent of suburban Americans don't want new development in their community.'Glad you tackled this subject. I've been pondering this dilemma a lot lately here in Ann Arbor. The jobs are here, the economy is great, the downtown is exquisite & walkable, but the community is so rabidly anti-development that any new construction has to take place in outlying areas. So nobody can actually afford to live in our exquisite, walkable city center...

Public comment is valuable, but only to a point. Citizens only get to "vote" on development projects or plans based on the Mayor/City Council members they elect (representative democracy). From there, it's up to Mayor/ City Council to appoint an independent Planning Commission and hire professional planning staff (separation of powers) to analyze issues and make decisions on them.

I thought the following reader comment/quote was spot-on:

Take no comfort in proper process or approval by those elected and appointed to handle such matters because small-minded and self-interested parties will use the court system to cost you [developers] time and money, exhaust your determination and get you to go away.

Every city in the world is growing, we need to take further measures to avoid urbanization problem in developmentThe "top-down" approach is reasonable and convenient in Certain Situations. It makes use of a deductive method of analysis. An Authorized agency imposes A Certain model of development. The Planning Process and Implementation then follow this model. This approach Generates feelings of order, clearness of purpose and appropriateness of efforts. The drawback of this approach is its command style. It Can Be Applied only in centralized and highly bureaucratic Economies